


happy shiny people everywhere

by Fatale (femme)



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alec is a lawyer, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Human, Drama, Growing up I guess, Happy Ending, Humor, M/M, Some angst, cooking with love, magnus is a nurse, some medical drama, sweet loft living
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-03 00:49:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14557245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/femme/pseuds/Fatale
Summary: Alec emerges from one of the bathroom stalls already fully dressed in a gray suit, plain white dress shirt, and hair neatly combed.He looks like he always does, which is to say: painfully handsome and angry at the world.A week into his new living arrangements and Magnus has realized that no matter where Izzy goes, she wears towering stilettos that hurt Magnus just to look at them, Jace is a mostly harmless douchebag, and Alec is a big mystery, their very own Phantom of the Loft.





	1. make a plan

**Author's Note:**

> Twenty-somethings on the cusp of thirty-somethings. It was supposed to be a New Girl thing, but only about 5% of the New Girl stuff happened. Still. It's a New Girl Thing.

 

The loft is too good to be true: rent-controlled, huge, an entire wall of windows overlooking a skyline barely more gorgeous than his three new roommates.

Siblings, all beautiful enough to fuel some late night fantasy by themselves, but together, a pervert's wet dream. Aside from the fact that three successive spectacularly awful breakups have lead him to take a no doubt short-lived vow of celibacy, he knows better than to shit where he eats. Mostly.

After putting his deposit down and moving in all his boxes, Magnus sinks into the couch, a brown leather sectional that’s seen better days, but still feels great against his ass. The elevator’s currently out or order and lugging twenty boxes of books up multiple flights of stairs has worked muscles he didn’t even know he had.

"I think I'm going to like it here," Magnus sighs, kicking his feet op on the coffee table, thrilled that he can, even though he has to nudge empty beer cans out of the way with his foot. His last place was so tiny, he could actually cook while showering, which, while convenient, wasn't sanitary.

"Glad you're feeling at home," Izzy says, sitting down next to him.  
"So, your brother," Magnus starts.

"Which one?"

"That tall, grouchy one that glared at me throughout the whole interview."

"Ah," Izzy says. "Alec. He's okay, it just takes him some time to warm up to new people."

"Is he more a meat and potatoes or a salad in the evening as a main dish kind of guy?

"More of a quinoa for dinner and Twizzlers while he's crying in the shower kind."

“Both ominous and intriguing,” Magnus says, interest sadly piqued. He just has the worst taste in men and women, honestly.

“Yeah, that describes Alec well,” Izzy says. “Just give him some space, ok? He’ll warm up to you eventually.”

“When might that be?”

“They say the polar caps will melt in 5,000 years,” Izzy says. “I’m 85% sure he’ll come around before then.”

“I await with breath that is bated.”

“Probably best you don’t,” Izzy says and turns on the TV.

 

\---

 

Everyone who lives in the loft shares a communal bathroom with stalls and one reasonably sized shower that groans whenever someone runs water anywhere else in the building, which is all the time.

So far, he has seen Jace, sporting impressive morning wood, yawning, and bumping into him on his way to the shower.

“Sorry,” Izzy says, with a grimace while brushing her teeth at one of the sinks against the far wall, “he does that sometimes. He’ll be sorry and apologize when he wakes up more.”

“He needs to put a leash on that thing,” Magnus grumbles and joins her at the sink. Alec emerges from one of the bathroom stalls already fully dressed in a gray suit, plain white dress shirt, and hair neatly combed.

He looks like he always does, which is to say: painfully handsome and angry at the world.

A week into his new living arrangements and Magnus has realized that no matter where Izzy goes, she wears towering stilettos that hurt Magnus just to look at them, Jace is a mostly harmless douchebag, and Alec is a big fucking mystery, their very own Phantom of the Loft.

He’s a lawyer, works absurdly long hours, and emerges each morning from the bedroom next to his with dark circles under his eyes, hangs around in the mornings long enough to drink a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice and scarf down a piece of overly-dense 9-grain bread and grunt out a hello to Izzy and Jace. Then he disappears until some ungodly hour in the evening, clutching an overstuffed briefcase to his chest and looking haunted.

Magnus rinses out his mouth, watching Alec wash his hands out of the corner of his eye. “Good morning,” Magnus says and Alec shrugs.

“I guess,” Alec says, straightening his tie and heading out the door.

“Same to you, asshole,” Magnus mutters, then puts it out of his mind. He’s running late for his shift at the hospital.

 

\---

 

His second and third career choices were motivational speaker and Bingo Hall Manager, respectively. After a brief trip to Fiji to be a scuba instructor, Magnus ended up back in the States with a broken heart, and somehow stumbled through the next couple of years, crash-landing into nursing school, which is an odd mix of gratifying and soul destroying.

He could stack up all his pharmacology and anatomy textbooks alone and build himself his very own cozy rent-controlled complex, if only school left him with the time and energy and will to live.  
Instead, like a fool, he’s paying into the economy for shelter.

Magnus pulls on his pale blue scrubs and heads the hospital where he’s doing his latest round of clinicals.

The problem is, Magnus thinks, no one tells you how to be an adult. You’re supposed to be a kid at 17, then a month later, voila! You pay your taxes, get healthcare, stay the hell away from other seventeen-year-olds unless you want to end up on the nightly news, clutching a prisoner number in a mugshot photo and looking scared.

So here he is in the last semester of school, nearly ready to go out in the world, yet again, and awkwardly stumbling his belated way to adulthood.

 

\---

 

The next morning, unable to sleep in, Magnus gets up unreasonably early and sees someone come in from the side door that leads to the roof, wearing sweatpants and a black hoodie.

Shamefully, even though he’s a reasonably large man, his first instinct is to shriek. For a wild moment, he thinks they’re being burgled and recalls his mother's many warnings about moving to the great big city, all about how he’ll be robbed and taken advantage of like he’s a nubile young milkmaid.

His mother was right and he’s going to die in Captain America pajamas.

Just then, the hood falls back and he recognizes Alec’s unpleasant and deeply attractive face.

When Alec notices Magnus' wide-eyed staring, he scowls and disappears into his room like a giant, lanky bat out of hell.

Though they’ve been living together for weeks now, Magnus only knows three things for certain about Alec: he drives a tragically sensible Toyota Corolla on purpose, he hates his job, and takes care of everyone else, but not himself, not in any way that matters. It’s as if somewhere along the way he decided quinoa and salads were an adequate substitute for happiness and joy.

And now, he’s just added another layer of mystery.

“Curious,“ Magnus mumbles to himself before getting coffee.

 

\---

 

Another week passes with Alec ghosting in and out of rooms like a poltergeist who uses the toilet and has shitty taste in music.

“I swear,” Magnus says, driven out of his room by thin walls and the irritatingly dulcet tones of Bon Iver, “If I have to listen to any more sad music while Alec sobs into his legal briefs one more minute, I won't be responsible for what I do.”

“Don’t kill him,” Izzy says distractedly, highlighting passages in her textbook. “Who would get you off?”

“Isabelle!”

She looks up and blinks, then grins slyly. “For murder, I meant. Where’s your mind?”

“It’s pretty much taken up a permanent residence in the gutter,” Magnus admits.

“Same,” she says. Her hair is pulled up into a messy bun and she’s wearing a worn green t-shirt with jeans, feet bare.

They get along so well, and Magnus has a brief flash of regret that he can’t ever fall in love with someone like her. He’s always reaching for some unattainable thing, some beautiful idea that’s just beyond his reach, convinced that this next thing is what’ll finally make him happy.

But it never does work that way.

“Hey, Izzy?”

“Yes?”

“Should we kiss? Just to try it out?”

“Hard pass,” Izzy says, not looking up from her textbook.

Magnus shrugs and pours himself a glass of wine. Never hurts to ask.

 

\---

 

It’s Friday and Jace and Izzy are out hitting the clubs. Normally, Magnus would be with them, but after pulling a double shift at the hospital, he's absolutely exhausted, his desire to possibly get laid superseded by his utter lack of fucks to give.

After a brief nap, he wanders into the kitchen to find Alec standing at the counter, gaze darting forlornly between a large cast iron pot and a prepackaged salad.

"Hoping something will magically appear?"

Alec starts at the sound of his voice. "I didn't know you were home." He clears his throat. "I was thinking of cooking something."

"Need some help? I graduated from Le Cordon Blue," Magnus says with a small flourish. "Learned how to make a lovely Croque Madame." He offers to make it because it’s delicious, full of fat, and flavorful, all things that have been seemingly missing in Alec’s life.

"Well, aren't you adorably zany," Alec says, sounding like he means anything but.

Magnus cannot figure him out. Everyone loves Magnus; he goes to great pains to make sure of it.

"Do you want my fucking help or not?"

Alec's stomach growls and he looks into the empty pot again. "The Cordon Bleu, really? That wasn't on your application when you moved in."

"I may have washed out the second semester, it didn't seem a good character reference."

"Do you think you can make that Crock--?"

"Croque Madame," Magnus corrects gently. "And yes, just--stand there." He goes to the refrigerator and gets out the eggs, cheese, ham, butter, and milk, and spreads it out on the counter. He washes his hands, puts a pot on the stove for the poached egg, dices the onion and starts a béchamel sauce. Once that's done, he portions out the ham.

"Can I help?" Alec asks.

Magnus hands him a thick, crusty loaf of bread and tell him to cut a few slices, then preheats the broiler.

He assembles the sandwiches as he poaches the eggs.

"Anything else I can do?" Alec asks, standing close, breath ghosting across the back of Magnus' neck.

Sure, Magnus thinks, he could get the fuck back before Magnus accidentally singes his eyebrows off.

“Nah, almost done,” he says, voice strained.

Alec baffles him, frustrates him, is irritatingly opaque and curiously easy to read. Because Magnus is an utter fool and a glutton for punishment, he's half in love with him already but isn't sure he actually likes him.

Sandwiches done, he plates them and carries them to the dining room.

He slides the two plates in front of him and grabs two beers, twits the caps off before putting one in front of Alec, who raises an eyebrow. "Thought you'd be more of a fancy wine guy."

"You're not," Magnus says before taking a long pull of his cold beer.

Alec takes a big bite of the sandwich, swallows, butter slicking his lips in the low light from the kitchen. "It's good," he says.

 


	2. hire a contractor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It becomes a habit of cooking a semi-elaborate meal on Fridays, kind of like their reward for surviving another deeply shitty week of adulthood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> going to be some medical drama in the next chapter. i will warn for it.
> 
> as always, VERY unedited. if that kind of thing bothers you, wait for it to be done.

 

 

It becomes a habit of cooking a semi-elaborate meal on Fridays, kind of like their reward for surviving another deeply shitty week of adulthood.

Alec gets the plates and glasses and silverware while Magnus cooks the meal, Alec hovering nervously over his shoulder, asking if he needs help or if a half of a cup is correct because when he looked up the recipe on epicuious.com, it only called for 1/4 a cup of flour.

"Why do you look up recipes you can't make?" Magnus demands.

Alec flushes an attractive pink color. "Just trying to learn."

After a while, they give up pretending to be responsible adults and eat most meals huddled on the couch while watching TV together. As it turns out, if you’re willing to sacrifice dignity, almost every fancy French dish can be eaten with your fingers.

One night, Alec asks, "How come you don't usually cook like this?"

"It's not fun cooking just for myself and Izzy and Jace wouldn't appreciate it. I once saw Jace eat a sandwich made out of pop tarts instead of bread."

"Yeah," Alec says, coughing. "He calls it his tart-wich."

"Is that what that is? I thought it was a terrifying sexual situation."

Alec throws his head back and laughs and Magnus notices the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles.

Magnus drinks his beer slowly, feeling it warm his belly and loosen his muscles, as he sneaks glances of Alec in profile, yellow-green light from the TV flickering over his face.

 

\---

 

When he wakes up the following Monday, Izzy is yelling at Jace to stop his bitching.

“I don‘t like the idea of you having a razor so close to my eyeball,” Jace complains.

“It’s an eyebrow razor, it’s not even that sharp,” Izzy explains, her patience slipping.

Magnus comes into the bathroom and Jace jerks his head towards the door.

“Jace!” Izzy yells.

“Ow, what did you do--”

Jace sits up, half of his left eyebrow gone.

“Oh, dear,” Magnus says.

“No no no,” Jace says spinning around and staring at himself in the mirror with horror. “I have a date tonight.”

“We know,” Izzy says, “with Clary. You’ve mentioned it a few dozen times.”

What is not clear, is if the girl in question knows it or not. He might be stalking Clary. When Magnus had asked Alec about it, Alec looked hesitant, then said, “Are we talking about the strict legal definition or more the spirit of the law?”

“It’s the only reason I let you clean up my eyebrows,” Jace is screeching when Alec comes into the bathroom.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” Izzy asks him, ignoring Jace with the ease of long practice.

Alec looks shifty. “Ah, no. I decided to take a personal day.”

Everyone in the bathroom stops and stares at Alec, Jace’s one and a half eyebrows raised.

“It’s not that big of a deal.” Alec looks at them hard. “I’ve taken personal days before.”

“You once tried to go to work with mono. You fell asleep on the subway and woke up in Coney Island,” Izzy points out.

“When you got into a car accident,” Jace says, “you insisted on going to work against the doctor’s orders. You threw up in the elevator on your boss‘ new Prada loafers.”

“That story never gets old,” Alec grumbles. “I don’t have to put up with this bullshit.“ He goes to brush his teeth and does a doubletake when he sees Jace in the mirror. “Where’d your eyebrow go, dude?”

 

\---

 

With Alec off for the day, and Magnus taking the early shift at the hospital, they’re both home alone by mid-afternoon. After three back-to-back episodes of some terrible reality TV, Alec is surreptitiously wiping his eyes.

“Seriously?”

“What?” Alec says, “She’s singing for her sick _mom_.”

Magnus doesn‘t know what to say to that. It seems cruel to ruin his illusions, but he's not sure how Alec ended up a semi-successful defense attorney. As it turns out, when not dealing with hardened criminals, he's kind of tragically gullible. “Hungry? I could make us something.”

“Hang on, I found a recipe,” Alec says, jumping up from the couch and hurrying into his room. Magnus stands outside the door, peering in. Alec’s room is beige, beige, beige. Magnus can’t believe anyone managed to stay awake long enough to put this color on all four walls.

Of course, his own room looks like a stoner from Burning Man staggered through Anthropologie with an unlimited credit card. It was a cool look in college the first and the second time, but at 30, he’s beginning to suspect it’s less well-traveled pothead chic and more a case of arrested development.

There has to be a middle ground, somewhere between his particular brand of cheerful trashy exuberance and Alec’s snooze fest, but Magnus hasn’t found it yet.

Alec comes back out, holding a half dozen printouts. Magnus flips through them critically. "Bobby Flay, really?"

"I kind of secretly like Tex-Mex," Alec confesses. 

"Sprinkling a packet of powdered taco seasoning on normal food does not automatically make it Tex-Mex, no matter what Bobby Flay says. Good God, man, half of these ingredients are from cans."

Alec shrugs, looking embarrassed, his hair soft and falling forward across his forehead. Magnus feels himself soften, wants to comb his fingers through Alec's hair and feed him decent food. They are so unsuited for each other in practically every way, but Magnus is stupidly, hopelessly infatuated anyway. 

"All right," Magnus relents. "Let's start with the basics."

 

\---

 

He should be studying, but instead, he’s showing Alec how to julienne cut carrots. Of course, he would have skipped studying for just about any reason, but Alec happens to be a particularly compelling one.

“Okay,” he says, holding the cubed carrot. “Now, we’re going to cut them into slices.”

“How thick?” Alec asks, hovering nervously. “Should I get a ruler?”

“Why would you do that?” Magnus asks, exasperated with both himself and Alec.

Honestly, Magnus is continuously exhausted by himself. He doesn’t know why he lusts after the type of man that would want to measure root vegetables, the type of man that may, in fact, despise him.

“How else will you know the correct thickness?” Alec asks.

“I go with what feels good,” Magnus says with a wink, unable to help himself.

Alec stares at him, mouth opening and closing, stuck somewhere between shock and outrage.

“I/16th of an inch,” Magnus says hurriedly.

Alec looks down at the vegetables and says, “You should aim higher.”

Magnus looks up, startled. “Oh, you made a little joke. Good on you.”

“Such a condescending prick,” Alec says, but he’s smiling as he carefully slices the vegetables to match Magnus.’

 

\---

 

Magnus finishes another horrible week at the hospital, long hours spent rounding on patients sandwiched between days of studying, exams, boring lectures, and bedpans. His life is really glamorous.

Without realizing it, he begins living for Fridays, mentally counting down the days until he can be eating delicious food, sprawled out on the couch next to Alec.

One night, Alec says, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

It’s probably the first time that Magnus can remember Alec voluntarily taking a direct interest in him. Mostly, unless he’s being fed, Alec ignores or looks baffled by him.

"You didn’t wash out of The Cordon Bleu, you’re an amazing cook.“

Magnus preens a little and Alec flushes. “I’m just stating the obvious. Don’t read too much into it.“

“You sweet talker, you.“

“Did you quit because you didn't love it, or because you were afraid to fail?"

“There’s no shame in failing, Alexander,” Magnus says. “The only shame is in never trying.”

“Still, you’ve failed--a lot. No offense.”

People only say no offense when they’ve said something really offensive, Magnus thinks.

“Thanks,” Magnus says. He will admit that he’s lived a particular brand of storied life, that it’s not for everyone. But he stands by his choices, every step forward and step back that has made him who he is now.

He ignores the voice in the back of his head telling him he has absolutely no fucking clue who that is.

He’s just -- an artist, a free spirit, a hedonist out to enjoy every pleasure life has to offer. So, he’s a made a few missteps, and in retrospect, being a professional horse groomer and his brief stint as a singing waiter _were_ errors in judgment. He can admit that now. He’s growing as a person.

“So, why criminal defense?” Magnus asks. “You don’t seem the type.”

“You mean, how’d I get into defending lowlifes? The absolute dredges of society?”

“Your words, not mine.”

“Oh, honestly,” Alec says, “they’re mostly guilty. “

“Remind me never to hire you should I find myself in need of legal counsel.” Magnus mentally adds, _Again_.

“I mean, sometimes I get a client that I’m sure is innocent and that feels great, but Izzy and Jace had a falling out with--and never mind, but I had to support all of us while they were both figuring stuff out. Jace deferred college, worked a stream of odd jobs, so I needed some way to make money. Unfortunately, criminals pay the best.“ Alec adds after a brief pause, “Probably because they’re criminals.”

“And you don’t mind it, defending people you know are guilty?”

“Does it really matter?“ Alec asks. “The law is reason free from passion.”

“My apologies to Mr. Aristole,” Magnus says, “but a life without passion sounds like a terrible thing.”

Alec looks insultingly surprised. “You know the quote?”

“I know many things, I'm an incredibly deep person,” Magnus says smugly. At Alec’s disbelieving look, he admits, “It was in Legally Blonde.”

“Ah, the world is turned right-side up yet again.”

Magnus laughs, hits Alec gently in the arm, and grinning, they finish dinner.

 

\---

 

The thing is, as with most things in life, the loft looks better from the outside in. Like Magnus, like just about anyone, it looks great at a distance, but up close, it's fucking falling apart.

There’s a steady drip under the sink that they use a bowl to catch and take turns emptying out, because they're all avoidant and merely adults in name only. Jace, their unlicensed and as far as Magnus can tell, their deeply unskilled handyman, decides to fix it. There may be actual band-aids involved.

“Don’t we have a superintendent?” Magnus asks, drinking some of Alec’s pulpy orange juice and shuddering a bit. Alec takes it fresh squeezed, no unrefined sugar. It tastes like sucking a penny, but it’s so unpleasant that it must be healthy. He feels more virtuous by the mouthful.

“Oh, yes,” Izzy says vaguely, sitting across the table from Magnus. “Remy. He’ll fix it for us, but one of us will probably have to sleep with him.”

“Yeah?” Magnus asks. “What does he look like?” He really wants to stop emptying that bowl.

“Not someone you’d want to sleep with,” Jace calls out from under the sink. “Why do you think I’m fixing it myself?”

“This conversation keeps swinging wildly between sexual harassment and prostitution. I’m not sure I should be here for this,” Alec says, drinking his orange juice with a straight face.

Magnus does not typically trust people with lousy flavor pallets; if one can lie about food, one can lie about anything. But Alec lives to be the exception rather than the rule.

From beneath the sink, Jace curses. There’s a metallic clank and a gush of water, followed by Jace’s subdued voice. “I’m going to guess I didn’t do this right.”

“You think?” Izzy snorts, lifting her feet so the small tidal wave doesn’t get on her suede boots.

Magnus feels the cold water slosh into his shoes and socks.

“I should probably call a professional to come fix this,” Alec says.

“That seems wise,” Magnus says.

 

\---

 

The next morning, Magnus is wandering through the apartment, trying to find scrubs that don't smell too bad, when he sees Alec slipping through the side door. Taking a page from Jace’s stalkers-lite handbook, he decides to follow him.

He finds Alec on the roof next to a rusted and defunct grill, sitting in a faded plastic lawn chair. At one point, it must have been lovely out here, but neglect has made it a sad reminder of better days. Everything and everyone needs some care and maintenance now and again. Without them, they become like the lawn chairs -- rusty with disuse. They become like Alec, an apathetic ghost in his own life.

The sun is coming up, painting Alec in golden pink and orange. He’s staring over the side, watching silently as the city wakes up and stretches.

“What are you doing out here besides being devastatingly handsome?” Magnus could just smack himself. Flirting comes like breathing to him, but Alec doesn’t appreciate it much. Sometimes he doesn’t know why he says half the things he says. Alec makes him tongue-tied and nervous in a way that honestly baffles him.

But he doesn’t get Alec’s usual narrow-eyed glare. Instead, Alec bites his lip thoughtfully, then says, “Sometimes when everything feels like too much, I come out here to watch the sunrise. It reminds me that life goes on.”

“Depressingly accurate, if morose,” Magnus allows. He lowers himself into an empty chair next to Alec. It squeaks threateningly beneath him every time he shifts his weight.

“Really? I think it’s comforting in a way. It feels like less pressure. It doesn‘t really matter what you do so much, I think, when you realize you’re a very small part of the universe.”

He’s seen Alec getting out of the shower, wearing little more than a hand towel because Jace fucking sucks at doing laundry, but he doesn’t know if he’s ever seen Alec stripped so bare. He looks relaxed, young, without the frenetic buzz of anxiety that usually surrounds him.

Alec leans down, picks up his mug of coffee and takes a sip.

“I can see how that would be comforting,” Magnus says, not adding that it’s probably especially true for someone who defends criminals for a living and clearly hates it. “But if the world’s a big moving puzzle, all the pieces overlapping nonsensically, then nothing matters. So I think we all just do the best we can.”

“That doesn’t bother you, the idea that we’re just blindly blundering our way through life? That we have no control over anything?”

“Alexander, control is an illusion.”

“So is freedom.”

“That may be true, but we don’t know how much time we have on earth. It’s up to us how we use that time and I’d rather live with the semblance of freedom than grasping for control.”

Alec leans back in the chair, shoulders loose. “You make a compelling argument, Counselor Woods.”

“Oh, you fucker,” Magnus says, leaning forward to steal his coffee. “I knew you watched that movie.”

 

 

 

 

 


	3. secure permits and order materials

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, shit. this was supposed to be three parts, now it's looking like 5 or 6.

 

  
“Is it just my imagination, or are you and Alec getting along better?” Izzy asks, scarfing down a bowl of some suspiciously bright cereal at the kitchen counter. It’s a shameful color for a medical student to be eating. They claim to be Fruity Pebbles, but Magnus has his doubts that fruit has anything to do with it.

“I guess?” Magnus says. “He’s pretty hard to read.”

“I’ve seen you go up to his secret hiding place where he mopes.”

“I didn’t know it was supposed to be a secret,” Magnus says. “He’s not very subtle about it.” He supposes someone Alec’s general size can’t be subtle about much.

“We used to tease him about it,” she says, finishing her cereal and slurping the leftover blue milk. Magnus shudders. She sets the bowl down and wipes her mouth delicately.

“You don’t anymore?”

"It’s kind of hard to tease someone about their mopey manpain when they’re really hurting and won’t talk to anyone about it.” She sighs and hops down from the stool.

“What made him this way?”

She shrugs as she rinses her dish out and sets it on the drying rack. “What makes any of us like we are? Life.”

Yeah, Magnus gets that. He had a relatively normal childhood spent buying ice cream off trucks, skipping class to make out with girls behind the dumpster, getting suspended, and smoking pot beneath the bleachers during football games. Later, a sense of boredom and ennui that only the very sheltered can afford, propelling him across the globe and various professions. Not every sad person requires an equally sad backstory. Sometimes life just doesn’t go your way.

“He hates complications,” Izzy says, walking around the counter and touching his shoulder. “But I think he’s lived an uncomplicated life long enough. You’re good for him.”

“Is this the part where you ask what my intentions are and warn me that if I hurt him, you’ll hurt me?”

“I hope your intentions are filthy,” she says, grabbing her lab coat and slipping it on. “And Alec’s a big boy. He doesn’t need me to fight for him.” She grabs her purse, jangles her keys a few times, then opens the front door. “Magnus?” she calls over her shoulder.

“Yes?”

“Fuck him over and they’ll never find your body,” she says before closing the door behind her.

 

\---

 

When Magnus gets to the hospital, his instructor gives him a list of his patients, carefully selected for being stable and agreeing to have a student nurse. Basically, he’s everyone’s bitch for the day. He answers call lights, gives meds, takes endless sets of vital signs, and reports any changes.

One of his favorite patients, Jimmy, a young newlywed involved in a massive MVA, is a dream. He rarely hits his call light, never complains about pain, even though his leg’s been broken in multiple places.  
Magnus sits with his wife, plays chess with him through his lunch break, and pokes his head in before leaving for the day.

“Anything you need, Jimmy?”

“Stiff drink and a cheeseburger?”

“Sounds like a party,” Magnus says. “After you get out of here, we’ll go do that.”

“You’re all pretty promises, Bane,” Jimmy says, grinning and closing his eyes. “That’s your problem, man, no followthrough.”

 

\---

  
“All right,” Izzy announces from the center of the room, “time for game night.”

“Game night?”

“We do game night when all of our weeks have been hell. We’re both gearing up for finals, Alec lost a big case, and Jace may or may not have the Clap.”

“Hey,” Jace says weakly from the kitchen. “It hasn’t been confirmed.”

“A ten-day course of antibiotics says I’m right,” Izzy answers breezily. “Besides, Clary wised up and dumped his ass, which is how Jace ended up in his predicament.”

Fucking the pain away, Magnus knows the urge well.

“So, what game are we playing?” Magnus asks, changing the subject. Jace is eating a Pop Tart, looking despondent. Magnus goes over and takes the Pop Tart from him, grabs another one from the foil packet and slathers some peanut butter in-between both and wordlessly hands it back to Jace, who looks pathetically grateful. Sometimes, it's the small concessions that mean the most.

“Candy Land,” Izzy says. “I’ll get the liquor.”

“This is not how I played Candy Land as a child,” Magnus says.

“We’ll explain the rules as we go along,” Izzy says, opening up the cabinet and pulling alarming amounts of tequila down. It's enough to fuel a strip club and a host of bad decisions for a lifetime. 

“I‘m not going to be able to get up tomorrow, am I?”

“Not if you win,” Izzy says. “Hey, go get Alec and let him know it’s time to play. Wait, never mind,” she says, then screams, “ALEC!”

“Jesus, Iz,” Alec says, rubbing his eyes and emerging from his room. He sees the bottles of tequila lined up on the coffee table and groans. “Not Candy Land.”

“You play this often?” Magnus asks. 

“Who knows,” Alec mumbles. “It’s not like any of us remember after.”

Candy Land according to the Lightwoods, as it turns out, is nonsensical rules dotted with terrifyingly precise historical trivia, too much alcohol, and one static rule: the floor is always lava.

They’re doing their best to stand upright in chairs when Jace tells everyone to pick a number. Magnus follows the rest of them, picks four and holds it up on his head, looking around to see what everyone else picked.

Alec, he notices, also picked four.

“Ohhh,” Izzy says, “Seven minutes in heaven.”

“What are we, fourteen?” Magnus asks, a little nervous.

He’s surprised when Alec says solemnly, “It’s the rules.” He hops off the chair, awkwardly landing on a throw pillow and jumps from pillow to pillow until he reaches the hall.

“Right,” Magnus reminds himself. Lava. Who is he to break imaginary and arbitrary rules?

He follows Alec's example, jumping from pillow to pillow until he reaches Alec, who grabs his arm and pulls him into the empty linen closet that would be overstuffed with linens if they weren’t all garbage at adulting. Last week, he caught Jace drying himself off with a paper bag.

In the closet, they’re uncomfortably close. He can feel Alec’s breath on his cheek, tequila-sour and warm.

“Haven’t done this in a while,” Magnus jokes awkwardly.

“Didn’t think I’d ever be back in the closet,” Alec says. “I came out my second year of law school. I figured even if I was going to become a lawyer like my parents insisted, at least I was going to do it on my own terms.”

Magnus doesn’t know much about Alec’s parents, except for the small hints Izzy and Jace have dropped. Alec has never spoken about them directly, has actually gone out of his way to cut them out of stories, all the more notable for their absence, a gaping void in otherwise idyllic stories of childhood.

Magnus’ mother might have been single, absent for most of his childhood while juggling two jobs, and maybe she didn’t notice Magnus kind of slowly falling apart, but at least she always told him he was perfect, as all parents should. “They couldn’t have been happy about that.”

“They came around eventually,” Alec says, a small frown tugging at the corners of his lips. “They’re good people, just have high expectations for us.”

They may very well be, though Magnus suspects he could convincingly argue otherwise. The thing is, even good people make mistakes, and Magnus can see how a lifetime of unrealistic expectations and small unkindnesses have weighed on their children.

Magnus says, “I know you got into criminal law for the money to help support Izzy and Jace, but you don’t have to take care of them anymore.”

Alec is distracting with his face and being all pretty like that, Magnus thinks muzzily, thoughts wandering off course for a moment.

“Ah, yes, as I was saying. Izzy’s all grown up and getting ready to graduate, and Jace is--ok, you should probably give up on him,” Magnus tries to say very gently, and Alec huffs a quiet laugh in the near-darkness. “But, they’re okay now. You should do what you want.”

“Should I?” Alec asks, inching closer.

Magnus tilts his head up in open invitation. “Yeah.”

“Okay,” Alec says and kisses him.

 

\---

 

When they stumble out, flushed and hair tousled, Izzy is standing outside the closet, tapping her toes. “So you guys were in there over seven minutes,” Izzy says, checking her phone, eyebrows raised speculatively. “Wonder what happened.”

Jace is sitting on the floor, back against the wall, clearly the only thing holding him upright. “Dude, that wasn’t enough time to get laid,” Jace scoffs. “Not even for you. I know it’s been a decade, but--”

“It’s not been that long for me,” Alec protests, “besides, I’ve been _busy_.”

“I can see that,” Jace says. “It’s been so long since you’ve been laid, I’m surprised your jizz hasn’t turned to dust.”

Alec’s eyes dart to Izzy. “Shut up,” he hisses at Jace.

Izzy rolls her eyes. “Please, I grew up with two teenaged brothers. I know all about your masturbation habits. God, Mom went through ten boxes of Kleenex a week. I think Dad bought stock in the company.”

“Izzy!” Alec yells, mortified.

Magnus starts laughing; he can’t help himself. Jace follows, face turning red, laughing until tears spring to his eyes.

 

\---

 

After Magnus stumbles off to bed, he strips down his underwear and falls face first into the mattress, right shoulder aching.

When he was eight, he stood up on his bike, face tilted towards the sky to see the landscape rush by. He was dizzy with his newfound freedom, racing with the clouds.

But pride always goes before a fall and his bike hit a bump in the road, his front wheel swerved and he hit the pavement, an awkward tangle of limbs. He got twenty stitches in his forehead, a nasty break in his shoulder that still aches when the seasons change, and a long scar that runs from his collarbone halfway to his elbow, a jagged reminder of the price one pays to be untethered.

There’s a soft knock on his door, and Magnus goes to answer, somehow unsurprised to see Alec there.

They stare at each other for a moment, Magnus acutely aware he’s wearing nothing but boxers, as Alec’s eyes dart down to his lips.

“Can I come in?” Alec asks.

Heart thudding somewhere in the vicinity of his throat, Magnus nods and lets the door swing open.

“What is this to you? What am I to you?”

“I don’t know,” Magnus says honestly. “Can you live with that, Mr. Control Freak?”

Alec shakes his head. “I don’t know, I don’t feel like I know anything anymore. I haven't been able to breathe in so long, and then you came in--but I know I like you and I want you.”

“Then I’m right here,” Magnus says softly. "I want whatever you'll give me."

Alec takes a deep breath and unbuttons his shirt, revealing his flat belly and strong arms. Magnus has seen him half-naked plenty of times but never in this context. He has never deliberately stripped for Magnus, slowly peeling off his shirt that hits the floor with a muffled whisper.

This is big, and Magnus is too sober for it. He wishes he could drink more, gain some much-needed distance, but Alec is here in his room, and Magnus isn’t going to turn down the one thing he’s wanted for all this time.

He reaches for Alec and pulls him close, guiding him towards the bed, covered with an ugly tapestry he bought at a lousy music festival a few years back.

Stretched out and half-undressed, Alec looks unspeakably lovely on the field of blue and green.

Magnus leans down and kisses his way from Alec's neck to the strong roll of his shoulders, then down to his stomach, jumping beneath his lips. He wants to rush this, just get to the fucking already, but this Alec and it’s too important to speed through like he has everything else in his life.

Magnus palms his own dick, already hard in his boxers. “Tell me what you want,” he says, voice husky, barely recognizable.

Alec takes a shaky breath. “I want you to fuck me.”

It’s not a wild or surprising request; all their activities up until now have lead to this inevitable conclusion. Hell, they’ve had months of foreplay, but somehow, Magnus never truly believed he’d hear the words spoken out loud.

“Okay, okay,” Magnus says as he tugs off his own boxers. He hears Alec suck in a breath as he takes in Magnus’ state of undress, eyes raking over his body and settling on his dick, painfully hard and flushed dark.

Alec lifts his hips obligingly as Magnus rolls down his pajama pants, nothing beneath them. If they keep going at this rate, Magnus might not survive the night.

He surges forward to kiss Alec, slick and hot, then he pulls back, Alec’s eyes still closed, expression a little dreamy. He tries not to manhandle Alec, he does, but he’s wanted this too badly for too long.

Once he gets Alec on his stomach, ass propped up by pillows, he runs his hands down Alec’s back, fingernails digging in and scratching lightly. He curls his hands around Alec’s hips to haul him up, so he can push his cock between Alec’s cheeks.

Alec fists the blanket beneath him and trembles.

If he keeps going, this is going to be the fastest, most disappointing fuck Alec’s ever going to have, and Magnus intends for this to last.

He pulls back and Alec sighs, chasing his mouth. “Why’d you stop?”

“Need a condom and lube if we’re going to do this,” Magnus says, not adding that he also needs a few minutes to cool down if it’s going to last more than a few minutes. Magnus cuts his eyes away from the sight of Alec on his bed, ass exposed and open for him, then leans over to grab a condom from his bedside table.

"You forgot the lube."

"Under the pillow," Magnus tells him and watches Alec fish around and come back out holding a small tube.

"Really?"

Magnus shrugs, unapologetic. "You never know when you'll need it in a hurry."

"I can't believe I'm sleeping with you," Alec complains.

Neither can Magnus, really, but he's learned people don't always get what they deserve. He can't be anything but grateful for that.

Magnus opens him up hurriedly, Alec hot and tight around his fingers, squirming beneath him. Magnus rolls the condom on and slicks himself, thinking, this is going to be over tragically soon if Alec keeps making those small gasping sounds.

Magnus grabs his dick and guides himself into Alec, fascinated by the way Alec opens for him as he works himself into the hot clench of Alec’s ass.

“Okay?”

“Yeah, perfect,” Alec breathes. “Don't flatter yourself, you’re not that big.”

“Sure about that?” Magnus asks, grinning and punctuating his question with a sharp thrust of his hips.

“Fuck, okay, you’re enormous,” Alec says, sounding breathless and irritated all at once. “I‘ll tell you whatever you want to hear if you'll just fuck me already.”

How he manages to sound pissy even now is a mystery, one that Magnus would be glad to encounter, over and over.

Magnus rocks his hips a few times, finding the right angle until Alec groans, toes curled.

He settles on a steady pace, fascinated by the muscles moving in Alec’s back, the way he grips and re-grips the headboard, leaving sweaty marks against the dark wood.

Magnus holds onto Alec’s hips, using them to pull him in closer and grind his cock in deeper as Alec just takes it, head bent down low.

“Magnus, Magnus,” Alec chokes out. “I’m close.”

So, Magnus moves his hands up to Alec’s chest to pull his body close, almost into his lap and fucks up into him, feels Alec’s chest heave beneath the flat of his palms. He reaches down for Alec’s hot, hard cock, and strokes it in rhythm with his thrusts.

Alec cries out, spilling into his hand and Magnus presses a kiss into the sweat-damp skin of his neck, feeling an echo, a flash of something that could be more, if only he let it, if he could have it sink into his skin the same way he’s sinking into Alec’s body. He chases the feeling across their bare skin to the points where he's gripping Alec tight enough to leave marks in the morning. And he almost has it, just as he feels white-hot pressure build up, but then he loses his train of thought and rhythm completely, swept away by the feel of Alec around him.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck,” Magnus mutters into Alec’s neck, mouthing at the skin there. Alec weakly tries to push back on his haunches to help out, but Magnus grabs his hips and pulls him down and holds him there as he comes.

One last time, that fleeting feeling of something larger, something too big to put a name to just yet, skitters by, but then, exhausted and shaking, Alec goes boneless in his arms and Magnus is pushing him forward and turning him over, desperate to taste his mouth.

The thought slips through his fingers completely as Alec’s lips meet his.

 

 

 


	4. demolition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> inevitable troubling homoerotic metaphors, here we come

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \---  
> \---
> 
> denotes medical drama.
> 
> \---  
> \---
> 
> i fear i have wandered too far from new girl to recover.

 

Magnus slips out of bed, takes his cell phone and calls his mom. Something about seeing the sheer hurt on Alec’s face when he talked about his own parents left Magnus feeling unsettled.

He lets it ring until it goes to voicemail. She’s probably working the late-night shift at the diner, so he waits for the beep and leaves a message. “Hey, I’m okay. Don’t panic, not in jail again. I was just thinking -- I wanted to thank you for doing the best you could with me, uh, I know I wasn’t the easiest kid. Anyway, you were a good mom. Love you. And be careful on your way home. All the perverts take the L at night.”

Before it beeps again, he hastily adds, “It’s your son, uh, Magnus. Happy Mother's day.”

He hangs up, then heads back to his room where Alec’s sleeping, illuminated by moonlight. That feeling of something clicking into place, like a key fitting into a rusty lock, hits him again. When he's getting back into bed, Alec shifts, eyes already open. He doesn’t ask where Magnus went, just pulls back the covers to let Magnus in.

“Can I ask you a question?” Alec asks, voice sleep-rough.

“Sure,” Magnus says, mentally bracing himself. They’ve done the dirty and now is when things get tricky; people start asking about the person attached to the dick, probing, and not in the fun way.

“Why does your ass say 'YOLO'?”

Magnus stiffens. Oh, fuck. He'd forgotten all about that. As far as Magnus is concerned, the only upside of having a tattoo on your backside is that you don't have to confront your own stupidity all that often.

He asks, “Can we chalk it up to youthful indiscretion and leave it there?”

“Sure,” Alec says, “but I’ve seen a lot of prison ink in my line of work, and this -- this looks homemade and pretty recent.”

“Look, it involved peyote and Mescal and mole sauce, which is as terrible of a combination as it sounds. There’s no elegant way to tell the story without you ceasing to see me as sexually desirable forever.”

“That would be a tragedy,” Alec says. “Consider the question withdrawn.”

Alec looks sleepy, perpetually exhausted by Magnus’ antics, probably, but ever so slightly charmed, which Magnus counts as a win.

They’re both terribly unsuited for each other. Alec only eats egg whites and throws the rest away; he has awful taste in music; he thinks black clothes only match black and gray only match gray. He spends all of his days looking like a tall, miserable candle, and Magnus--

Magnus might kind of be crazy about him.

Despite that fact that the way Alec's looking at him now - eyes soft, mouth turned up - makes Magnus uneasy, he's pretty happy. Maybe happier than he's been in a long time.

“I knew you would grow to love me,” Magnus says smugly, trying to cover up how off-kilter he feels. “Everyone does. I’m like a fungus. Wait, no.”

“That sounds accurate,” Alec says, laughing, not discounting any of his joking assertions, and Magnus feels his anxiety ratchet up to an 11.

Alec leans over and gently kisses the scar bisecting Magnus’ shoulder before settling into sleep.

 

\---

 

“Someone had a good time last night,” Jace says. He looks like shit, and that could be the tequila talking, but he hasn't looked great in a while.

“Ah,” Magnus says, flipping the last of the pancakes, “inevitable troubling homoerotic metaphors, here we come.” He tossed and turned last night before giving up some time in the early morning and sneaking away to make a full-on drank too much, too old for this shit breakfast. Magnus scans the stacks of pancakes, the multiple pounds of bacon, the small mountain of scrambled eggs. It's possible he went a bit overboard.

“You think that’s an insult?” Jace asks. “It's not an insult, buddy. I took Alec to his first gay club."

"Do tell."

"It was Twinks and Bears night at a place called Flaming Saddles.”

“Really?” Magnus asks, impressed despite himself. Izzy emerges from her room looking mostly steady on her feet, despite "winning" Candy Land last night. Magnus is beginning to suspect no one really wins at their version.

“I didn’t have to buy drinks all night,” Jace brags, looking proud of himself.

“Were all the drinks bought by large men in leather?”

“...yes?” Jace says, looking alarmed.

“I thought so.” Magnus brings all of the dishes to the table and lays them out in order of sheer greasiness, his very favorite way of setting a table for the slightly pathetic. He's had enough morning afters to have a preferred method, which is kind of sad.

“What does that mean?”

Alec comes out of the bedroom then, pulling a shirt over his head. Magnus notices it’s one of his and he can’t help the warmth that pools in his belly. It's a shade too small, but it's green, brings out the golden-green flecks in Alec's eyes. Magnus ruthlessly stomps the feeling down and pours Alec some of his ungodly pulpy orange juice. Just watching the chunks disrupt the juice's surface tension makes him want to blow some, and the world makes sense again. Feelings of regret at his actions last night is something he understands.

“What does that mean?” Jace asks again, increasingly panicked. He looks ready to cry. “Alec?”

Alec looks at Jace like he’s crazy and pours himself a bowl of muesli, earning a scowl from Magnus. He cooked all of this for Alec, kind of.

“It’s high in fiber,” Alec says, looking surprised.

“How sexy you are.”

“Can’t eat butter and cream all the time,” Alec tells him. “The good stuff only tastes good because you have it once in a while.”

“Yeah, yeah, tell it to Oprah, Dr. Oz,” Magnus grumbles, which starts Izzy in on a seemingly well-trodden rant about TV show doctors and how they’re little more than snake oil salesmen pandering to the lowest common denominator, Jace finally forgetting his close brush with twinkdom to argue that TV Doctors are _showmen_ and don’t owe anyone _jack_ , Alec rolling his eyes and sneaking glances at Magnus, grinning softly at him in-between bites of cereal.

 

\---

\---

 

Magnus gets his assigned patient list at the hospital and scans it. He didn’t get him for an assigned patient, but he decides to stop by Jimmy’s room anyway to say hello before he starting on his rounds.

The first thing he notices is Jimmy is alone in the room, back to the door. "Hey, get any sleep last night?" Magnus chirps, trying to feel as cheerful as he sounds. He steps into the room worriedly when Jimmy doesn't respond.

The second thing is Jimmy’s shoulders, shaking. He turns him over and sees Jimmy gasping, chest rising and falling rapidly.

Magnus scans the wall, looking for the code button above the bed, but there are too many buttons and switches and he can't find the correct one. He runs to the door, yells for help, then runs back to the bed. "Jimmy, can you hear me? You're going to be okay."

A nurse pokes her head in, sees Jimmy on the bed, Magnus' panicked face and grabs the phone, dials 25, gives the room number and rushes to take over for Magnus. By the time she's pulled the lever to flatten the bed, and slipped an oxygen mask over Jimmy’s face, the Code Team in the room, bustling around the bed, starting an IV, hooking him up to monitors.

Magnus is still holding his hand as a nurse pulls back the sheet and gown to see Jimmy’s pale skin mottle, every gasping breath pulling his skin in tight around his ribs. “Stay with me." Jimmy's eyes slip shut. Around him, nurses and doctors are flying around the room.

“We need the room,” a man says, holding his shoulders to pull him back. Jimmy’s hand slips from his and Magnus watches it fall, vaguely hears someone call for Streptokinase as if he's miles away from the action, just an observer in his own life. 

Magnus knows what it is, sees Jimmy’s face for one last brief minute, and then he can’t see anything at all, staff closing the gap between them and blocking his view.

Comminuted fracture of the distal femur. It’s not a blood clot.

He’s watching the hands on the clock tick by, marking down the minutes that pass, thinking that Jimmy’s wife probably popped down to the cafeteria to get something for breakfast, then got lost on her way back. All the renovations they’re doing to the hospital means the route changes day to day. Nothing is quite as he remembered it.

The heart monitor beeps and goes flat. They do CPR for a while until one of the doctors calls time of death.

His instructor comes up behind Magnus and places a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Likely pulmonary embolism. Known complication of long bone fractures. There was nothing you could have done.”

“I know,” Magnus says. Even if he had remembered to pick up the damn phone, it wouldn't have made a difference. Still. 

"Write up your note and then go home for the day," she says, probably meaning to be kind.

He pulls away from her and leaves the room, wandering the halls, dazed.

The gargantuan hospital is in a constant state of renovation, walls change location daily, tarps and warning signs blocking off doorways. The gift shop has moved locations at least three times since he started working here. The old shop is abandoned now, down a long dusty corridor seldom trafficked. Past that, is a bathroom at the end of the hall.

He makes his way to the bathroom, checks each stall to make sure they're empty, then locks the door.

He stares at himself in the mirror, shaking. The sounds start in his chest, deep guttural sobs that make his shoulders shake and his eyes burn. His patient was sitting up and talking to him, making plans for the weekend after discharge. They were going to get drinks and eat an inadvisable amount of beef.

Soon, he’ll be on a slab in the basement.

Magnus pounds his fist against the counter until his knuckles are sore and swollen.

 

\---

\---

 

He passes by Jimmy’s wife on the way out the front revolving door. She’s sitting in the hard plastic chair, watching people come and go. He thinks of pretending he didn’t see her, of going home, taking a hot shower and crawling into bed. He doesn’t owe her anything, likely won’t see her again in his entire life, but tonight is the worst night of her life and he's become a part of that story. He takes his duffle bag off his shoulder and goes to sit down next to her.

“Magnus?” she asks, looking up, eyes red, puffy, and utterly devastated.

He thinks of the shitty way Jace uses everyone else's towels because he leaves his own a soggy mess on the floor; he thinks of Izzy eating technicolor cereal, judging all the stupid men in her life; and Alec, murmuring, “YOLO” in his ear before kissing him goodbye.

This is the price of love, Magnus thinks dully.

“Thought you might need some company,” he says.

“Thanks,” she says. “I can’t go home to an empty house. So I’m just…sitting here.”

So he sits with her over the next couple of hours as morning bleeds into night and a new day dawns.

 

\---

 

He takes the subway home, so tired he could curl up on one of the uncomfortable benches and sleep for a year.

The entire ride home, his hands ache.

At the apartment, Alec is working at the dining room table, papers spread out in front of him. He looks up at Magnus, smiling. "You're home late or really early, depending on how you look at it. Does that mean a bad day or a very good one?"

“What am I doing with my life?”

“Being dramatic as usual, I suspect.” Alec’s voice is wry and teasing and it’s exactly the wrong thing to say at the moment. Magnus is lost, unmoored, a thirty-something on the brink of starting over yet again, and he's being judged by some asshole who wouldn’t know happiness if it bit him in ass and wore a sign around its neck. Alec doesn't understand fucking up because he's never put himself in the position to. 

Fuck Alec and his quinoa and his shitty 9-grain bread. He doesn’t have the right to judge Magnus. He's never risked anything, never gambled on a new beginning and lost.

If Magnus weren't so tired, so exhausted and burned out, if he'd been given more than a second to think, he'd have realized that he was being unfair and that none of this was Alec's fault at all. But there’s the rub: things aren't that easy and people never do. Because they are human and because they are flawed and because this is life.

“Fuck off,” Magnus says very eloquently. 

Alec looks gobsmacked for a minute, then angry. “I don’t know what crawled up your ass--”

“Do you even remember what happiness is?” Magnus demands. “Can you remember back that far? Or were you born this way? A sad, uptight son of a bitch who can’t connect with a human being, so you hide in paperwork and misery and tell yourself it’s for your family.”

Two high spots of color have appeared on Alec's cheeks. “Me? I can’t connect with people? What about you? You're such a phony," Alec bites out. "Everything about you is fake. It’s all smoke and mirrors--all a great big show to hide that there's nothing inside, nothing of substance.”

Somehow, he'd convinced himself Alec hadn't noticed. Magnus feels found out, ripped open, laid bare and found wanting, and it makes him sacred, mean, and unkind. His voice, when it comes, is vicious, "And what about you? You pretend to be so aloof, so above it all. You don't need anyone. You're one of the loneliest people I know. You pretend not to need anyone because you don't know to have them." Alec's hands are balled into fists, knuckles white. His eyes are wide, hurt, and furious.

And so, because Magnus can’t help himself from fucking up every good thing that has ever happened to him, he goes in for the kill: “That doesn't make you strong, it makes you pathetic. And I feel sorry for you.”

Ales stands and leaves the room.

Magnus flinches as the door bangs closed behind him.

 

\---

 

Fuck it all, Magnus thinks in a blind panic. He doesn’t need this kind of shit in his life. He can do anything -- hunt gators again, try his hand at selling unnecessary insurance for overly expensive and complicated phones.

He doesn’t think, just grabs the backpack he used for a memorable, hair-raising trek through Latvia a few years back and starts packing. He grabs the photo of his mom tucked into the mirror of his dresser, enough clothes to get him through the next week as long as he’s not overly particular about how he smells. As he rifles through his drawer for his passport, his eye catches on the recipe book that Alec bought him last week as a joke. He picks it up, staring at Bobby Flay’s smug face. Inside, he knows, is a small note from Alec: _Thanks for the lessons, maybe one day I can return the favor?_

Magnus leaves it on the bed, feeling heartsick and more than a little lonely.

 

\---

 

On his way out, he passes Jace, sitting on the couch with a bottle of scotch. Alec's papers are still scattered over the table where he left them, but he's nowhere to be found. Jace’s hair is ungelled, loose, blond hair falling into his eyes. He looks fucking miserable and Magnus thinks there’s a lot of that going around recently. Jace’s eyes flit over Magnus’s face to the hastily-packed backpack slung over his shoulders. If one could scratch their balls dejectedly, Jace does. "Going somewhere?"

“Still itch?” Magnus asks, ignoring the question. He would feel sympathetic, but he’s too busy feeling sorry for himself. He’s full up of emotion and none of them pleasant.

“You know it,” Jace says, sipping his scotch.

“Take your amoxicillin. Stop fucking around and go talk to Clary,” Magnus says. It’s super easy to see what people should do unless it’s yourself.

Jace snorts. “Oh, you’re an example of a healthy relationship now.”

“Right,” Magnus says, sucking in a breath. That didn’t hurt at all.

“You’re a  coward.”

“Well, at least my dick isn’t contagious,” Magnus says. 

“Yeah,” Jace says, “maybe I’m stupid and self-destructive - not that you'd know anything about that - but I’ve never been afraid to go after what I really wanted and I’ve never let fear of losing something I love make me throw it away.”

“You’re right,” Magnus says, blinking.

Jace’s eyebrow is crooked from where he’s been drawing it on with Izzy’s makeup pencil, the tail a shade too high, lending him a perpetually quizzical look, like he’s always vaguely confused by his surroundings, never quite sure what's happening and always a little bemused. He's a horndog who has never held a fulltime job and repairs plumbing like one would a scraped knee. Still, he sticks by his family. That makes him a better man than Magnus.

Jace says, “You’re gonna look back on this moment and regret it.”

“I already do,” Magnus answers.

He takes the elevator down. It’s begun raining outside, a light drizzle, just enough to cast a haze over the ground and make him wonder what he's seeing when he turns back and catches sight of a small, dark shape against the skyline, leaning up against the roof's short railing. His Uber pulls up to the sidewalk. Before sliding into the car, Magnus looks back one last time, afraid that if Alec’s still there, he’ll lose his nerve completely and go running back to him and a life that was beginning to feel too comfortable.

But there’s no one there anymore.

Magnus tosses his bag into the backseat and gets in, feeling numb.

 


	5. work behind the walls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing more, nothing less.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> look, i know i upset folks with the last chapter, so have this one. in case you haven't noticed, this is just one really long story about nothing. i swear this will end happily, though.

 

  
It takes him less than half an hour at the airport to realize he left his passport back at the loft, and he has his doubts either Izzy or Jace will be accommodating enough to mail it to him once he gets settled somewhere. He scans the US departures, wincing when he sees a flight to Detriot pop up as the next boarding that he can possibly make. Well, he’s never been to the Motor City. Maybe he’ll run into Eminem.

Magnus gets to the ticket counter, purchases a one-way flight to Detroit and heads to the boarding gate when a large crack of lightning flashes across the window and a not-at-all-sorry voice announces that all flights are delayed due to weather.

His stomach growls, reminding him that he hasn’t eaten in nearly twenty-four hours. After scoping out the hideously long lines at both food courts, he settles on a pack of chips and a soda from a kiosk and settles in to wait out the storm.

Tired folks are setting up shop, spreading out blankets, huddled together, stretching out across uncomfortable scooped seats designed to fuck up your back.

Truth be told, he’s been gone for all of three hours and he’s ready to fuck off and go home but remembers Alec turning away from him on the roof, and wonders if he still has one. Because, he realizes, totally without his knowledge and against his express desires, home has become wherever Alec and his ridiculous, boozed-pickled siblings are.

What is he doing, running again? He’s found a career that touches him, taps into his intrinsic need to help others, and makes him proud of himself in a way he has never quite been before, but it’s tough, maybe tougher than anything he’s ever done. But he thinks he can do it with Alec by his side, peering over his shoulder, anxiously asking him, “Should I get out a ruler?” He could probably do anything with Alec by his side. 

He's the wrong side of thirty, stuck in classes with too-earnest teenagers, has $24 cash in his pocket, a few credit cards with overdue balances, a backpack full of all his worldly possessions, and an ill-advised tattoo on his ass. People are all around him, two women laughing over youtube videos, heads bent down low together, a young mother holding a sleeping baby, families, and friends as far as the eye can see. And he’s the weird guy crouched down by a trashcan eating stale Funyuns.

What would it be like to have a sense of family, of belonging, to wake up next to the same person every day?

He doesn’t know, but he thinks it’s time to find out.

Magnus stands up, wipes his hands on his jeans, and heads towards the front doors.

He thinks this is just life, full of these big, unanswerable questions. But if you have the courage and the willpower to see it through, and with a hell of a lot of luck, you might find someone that makes that journey a little less lonely.

On his way out, he goes past the Duty Free, an entire display of different Bobby Flay books telling him in obnoxious font how to cook astonishingly mediocre food.

He goes in and buys one of each cookbook.

 

\---

 

After all this time, he finally knows what he wants and he’s going to have it. The excitement or the lousy airport food might just kill him, he's interested to find out which. Magnus bursts through the front door and calls out, “Alexander!”

Jace is sitting on the couch in the exact same place Magnus last saw him. “Oh, it's you,” he says, letting his head drop and hit the back of the couch.

“Have you even moved?” Magnus asks, slightly concerned.

“Eh,” Jace says, neither confirming or denying.

“Is Alec home?”

“I think he left for work a little after you left.”

Magnus doesn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t for Alec to carry on as usual. “Was he crying or anything?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Not even a sniffle?”

“Not that I recall,” Jace says, though his memory is probably suspect at best.

“Did he seem sad?”

“No more than usual. He ate that awful fiber cereal for breakfast. I think that’d make anyone grouchy. I once ate it and I couldn't poop for a week.”

Speaking of work and things that belong in bedpans, Magnus should probably get his ass to school. He looks at the clock, wincing when he realizes he’s already missed the scheduled exam. Magnus lets his backpack drop to the floor. So much for his grand entrance.

Magnus crosses the room and sits down heavily next to Jace, then screws up his face. “Oh, darling,” he says, “best you shower now. Off you go.”

 

\---

 

After maneuvering Jace into the shower and spending a horrifying fifteen minutes drying him off, of which Jace helped very little, Magnus dumps him into a shivering mess on his bed.

“Magnus,” Jace says. “You’re so good, you’re great, but you hurt Alec’s feelings and I’m going to have to kick your ass. That’s what Izzy says.”

“Later,” Magnus promises, sitting on the edge of the bed to pull the cover over Jace and tuck it in around his sides. Jace raises one arm weakly and smacks Magnus on the shoulder. “Did you try to slap me?”

“Maybe,” Jace admits sheepishly.

“You missed,” Magnus tells him. He returns the favor, just a hair harder because he's a nice person but he's no fucking saint and it's been a long couple of days.

“Hey,” Jace says, outraged. “You can’t hit me, I’m heartbroken.”

“You’re a drunk mess that brought this on yourself.”

“Fuck you, Bane,” Jace cries weakly and slaps at him again. Magnus dodges easily and slaps back.

“Am I interrupting something?” Izzy asks from the door.

“Manly fisticuffs,” Magnus says, eyes dropping to the floor, fighting an acute sense of embarrassment, suddenly very aware that he was literally having a slap fight in bed with another man. It’s a distinct possibility a less masculine set of circumstances has never, ever happened in this room and that includes the time he found out Jace wears women’s deodorant because he likes the way it smells.

“You’re back?” Izzy asks.

“Looks like.”

“Shame,” she says, turning to leave, “I was going to use your deposit to buy a new pair of shoes.”

He jogs to catch up with her, meets her in the kitchen where she’s getting down a couple of mugs. She fills up the kettle and puts it on the stove to heat up. Before this very moment, Magnus wasn't sure she knew how to use the stove. It's possible she thinks all food is grown in boxes.

“You still could, you know. I don’t have to be here. I know I did something--terrible.”

Izzy sighs and kicks off her shoes, leaving them in an untidy pile in the middle of the room. Magnus knows he’ll stumble over them at some time in the middle of the night, but can't bring himself to care. She only takes off her shoes when she's relaxed and among friends.

“It wasn’t terrible,” she says, getting down two teabags. “It was short-sighted and maybe unkind, but I don’t think you could ever do anything terrible. You two had a fight. These things happen.”

She puts this teabags in the mugs and fills them up with water, sliding one across the counter to Magnus. “So, you’re not going to have to find a place to hide my corpse?”

Izzy laughs and stirs her tea. “Not yet. Besides, I’d incinerate your body. Poof! No corpse,” she says and takes a calm sip of her tea.

 

\---

 

After finishing his drink, Magnus stumbles off to bed.

He wakes up sometime later to hear someone moving around outside. Magnus sits up, rubbing gritty eyes, and goes out to into the hall, following the sounds of metallic clanking.

Alec is standing in the kitchen, washing lettuce in a silver colander.

“Oh, it’s you,” he says, glancing at Magnus. His sleeves are rolled up, tie loosened, top buttons undone at the neck. He’s been at work late and his eyes are tired, dark smudges beneath them, complexion sallow. It’s like taking a slice of their past and superimposing it over their present, a negative of a photo a little out of focus and wrong when taken in the context of their whole story. And Magnus does believe their story isn't over yet.

“Here I am,” Magnus says a little lamely. He barely refrains from adding a _Ta-Da_ on the end. 

“You want some of my salad?” Alec asks. The leaves are droopy looking and brown around the edges.

“I could make us something?”

“Yeah, sure,” Alec says, leaving the lettuce in the sink and taking a step back. Magnus goes to the refrigerator and scans the contents, thinking. His first instinct is to make something fancy that no doubt Alec will enjoy, but what the man really wants is some kind of shitty Tex-Mex mess on a bun.

“Give me a minute,” he says, holding up a finger and going to his room. He rifles through his cookbooks, then pulls out one at random and brings it to the kitchen.

He turns it around with a flourish.

“Mesa?” Alec asks, eyebrows raised.

“According to Bobby Flay. Looked through this cookbook on my way home. It promises explosive flavors. I assume the accompanying explosive diarrhea just goes without saying. There’s a fried chicken slider with a spicy mayo dressing I think you’d like.”

“Sounds good,” Alec agrees. “Do you need to find the recipe?”

“Alec,” Magnus says, exasperated. “It’s a fried chicken breast with mayonnaise on top of it. I think I can manage.” He pulls out the chicken, garlic, shallots, eggs, milk, and panko flakes. “You can chop the garlic.”

“I’m glad you’re back,” Alec says quietly, grabbing the bamboo cutting board and the correct knife on the first try, Magnus notices with pride.

Magnus looks down at his hands. “I should apologize.”

“What?” Alec says, genuinely surprised. “Why?”

Magnus just stares at him, unsure what to do. If Alec doesn’t think he’s owed an apology, it seems like a waste to point out the myriad ways he’s mishandled their relationship. He settles on, “I shouldn’t have left.”

Alec quirks an eyebrow and starts chopping the garlic, using quick, precise movements. “You were gone for less time than a regular shift at your clinicals.”

“Sill--”

“It’s fine,” Alec says, working. “We’re not boyfriends. We never defined anything. You didn't say anything that wasn't true. Besides, I said some awful things to you that I didn't mean, and for that, I'm sorry, too."

Alec’s given him the perfect out, and as much as Magnus wants to feel lucky that he’s slid right back into Alec’s life the same easy way he did when Alec held back the covers in bed on the first night, no questions asked, no explanations offered, he finds that he wants more. But he doesn't know how to ask for it, doesn't know where to begin to repair something he's fractured.

After the meal, Alec cleans up, same as always. He dries his hands, then says, “I’m going to bed. You’re free to join me, of course.”

Magnus follows him, a little lost.

They strip down to their boxers with the lights off and Alec gets into bed, leaving room for Magnus.

As soon as he lies down, Alec rolls over and kisses him, hand tugging at the waistband of his boxers.

“Alec, Alec,” Magnus says, breaking the kiss with effort. “I don’t think we should--not right now.”

“Got it,” Alec says, pulling back. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No, of course not,” Magnus says miserably. “This is your room." He wants to say something else, knows he absolutely should, but he doesn’t know how to form the words. This is so close to everything he wanted but not quite right. There must have been a time earlier, maybe right after they met, maybe during their first night together when Alec asked Magnus how he felt about him, or maybe the next morning when he left Alec in bed alone. There must have been a single instance where he could have made a slightly different choice and they’d be so more than what they are now -- roommates, home chefs, occasional fuckbuddies. Nothing more, nothing less.

“Then we’ll just sleep?”

“Sure,” Magnus says, listening to Alec breathe in the dark.

 

 


	6. reconstruction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> please stay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok, ok. so i know this is kind of retreading old ground - magnus leaves, comes back, and so on, but as someone pointed out, the end of the stories i write is when he makes a decision to come back and i never really go beyond that. sooo, because i was curious, i wanted to make his decision the middle and see how everything after unfolds when people are ridiculous and flawed and messy. ho ho. some of you all didn't like that. but to everyone who stuck around and stayed chill, thank you! to everyone that freaked out and yelled at me - also, thank you! though i didn't love it at the time, it's a good thing to write something that people are passionate about. <3!
> 
> one more chapter to go, and it's so much sweet fluff, you'll have to take your insulin before reading. good times.

 

 

Magnus goes to the hospital for his next shift and gets all the way to the front door before he stops. No matter how many times he tries, he can’t make himself go inside. He pulls out his cellphone with shaky hands, calls in, then sits on a bench.

Inside, people are being born, dying, leaving their loved ones, starting new families, recovering from accidents, praying another one doesn't happen. And all of them are handling it with more grace than this old-ass college student making a last weak grasp to find meaning in his life, cowering in a bench by the bushes.

He passes the morning watching the nearby construction equipment, the machinery beeping, men yelling instructions at each other in a shockingly butch manner. Even in the short time he's been assigned here, the entire layout of the hospital has changed at least three times, the locations of the walls alternating daily. The center of the hospital, the cafeteria, is always static, but the route to it is getting harder and harder for him to remember, always shifting. The nurses and staff joke that it’s been under construction for 30 years and it’ll never actually be done because, by the time they’ve renovated one wing, it’s time for the next.

Sounds about right.

At some point, Magnus must have trusted people, let them see who he was, but he can’t remember exactly how or when that changed. Disappointment and heartbreak, vowing to never go through it again until his heart, too, was a maze, impossible to find.

He thinks Alec might have found it, though.

Around midday, his Clinical Instructor comes out, holding two cups of coffee. She hands him one, then lights up a cigarette and takes a long drag.

“Really?” Magnus asks, raising an eyebrow. “A nurse at a hospital?” 

“Don’t be one of those judgy assholes, don’t do it. Half the staff smokes."

She's right, though. Magnus has seen plenty of the doctors treat someone for COPD, then sneak out for a smoke break. 

"I love this job," he says, surprising himself, “but I'm not sure how much of this can I take.” He thinks of Jimmy looking into his eyes, gasping, lips blue around the edges, sad and knowing.

“If it’s not for you, it’s not for you. No shame in it. But you do as much as you can, give as much as you can, and then go home to your family. And then you get up the next morning and do it all over again.”

“No disrespect but that sucks.”

“Look, kid," she says, laughing, "no one ever promised it would be easy. The best things in life require work and balance.”

Magnus scoffs, “I’m hardly a kid.”

“I’m riding this gig out until retirement in a couple of years. 'Kid' is just a matter of perspective.” She stubs out her cigarette on the ground and Magnus shakes his head, mentally adding blatant litterbug to her mounting list of dubious qualities.

He wonders if he’s strong enough for this job, strong enough for this life. He'd always told himself he was being fearless and adventuresome, but it was the opposite. He’s been afraid his whole life, skipping out as soon as anything became too important to him. He’s already had his great epiphany, figuring out what he wanted in the airport in a silly, dramatic fashion, but epiphanies aren’t change and wanting something badly enough isn’t the same as knowing how to get it. As it turns out, great inspiration is just a precursor to all the hard work that has to follow.

What are his options, really? Close himself off, never care about anything or anyone? Or risk getting his heart broken? If love and happiness aren't worth the risk, then nothing is. He thought he could do it with Alec by his side, but maybe, he can do it by himself anyway.

Without Alec, life will go on, even if not as bright or joyous as it once could have been.

Magnus sips his coffee and watches the sun rise high in the sky as life goes on around him.

There’s a comfort to knowing that no matter how much he’s fucked up, tomorrow will come same as always.

He’s not sure, but he thinks Alec might have taught him that. Goddamnit.

 

\---

 

Back at the apartment, Jace is eating some of Izzy’s awful cereal dry by the handful like an animal. At least it’s an improvement from liquor, so Magnus will take it. 

“How long are you going to do this to yourself?” Magnus asks, sitting down next to Jace.

Jace rolls his head towards Magnus, looking exhausted. “It’s not about Clary. I barely even know her, but she seems nice. I mean, I get it. I‘m a little intense, sometimes I come on too strong,” Jace says, voice low and rough. “Did you know I was adopted?”

“I suspected,” Magnus says carefully. He’s blond where Alec and Izzy are dark-haired, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out. 

“My mom died, then my dad, well, it doesn't matter, but he's gone, too. Then the Lightwoods adopted me. I got everything I ever wanted - a mother, a father, a brother, and a sister. I was so pathetically grateful, I even took their name without a glance back.”

Magnus gets it. He knows too much about being alone. 

Jace continues, “But then Alec and Izzy’s dad left the family and ran off with his mistress.”

Magnus hadn’t known that. 

Jace lets the box drop on the floor, confetti-like cereal spilling everywhere, sad like the empty room of a party once everyone’s gone home. “Why am I so easy to leave? What is it about me?”

If Magnus had any more heart left to break, it would be breaking now. He scoots closer to Jace and puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not about you, trust me. It has nothing to do with you.”

“But it keeps happening to me. See, over the past few days, I've given a lot of thought, and _I’m_ the common denominator,” Jace continues doggedly, even though he’s tearing himself apart to do it. 

“People just suck,” Magnus says softly, shaking his head. “They’re sad and afraid and don’t know what they want. It says absolutely _nothing_ about you.”

Jace curls up next to him, lets his head drop onto Magnus’ shoulder. 

“Do you want a tart-wich?" Magnus tries. "How did you begin making those crimes against humanity?”

“I started making those because when I was a little kid, I got hungry and it was all I could make without heating anything up. I was too short to reach the stove, there was no one else, and I just liked the way it tasted.”

“Right,” Magnus decides. “No more of those then. That's the saddest fucking story I've ever heard, they’re awful for you, and you’re punishing yourself.”

Jace gives him fits, makes him despair for the human race, and will sometimes say something so on-point and observant that Magnus thinks all the rest must be a clever ruse. But through the good and the bad, he’s family. “Stay here," Magnus says. "I’m going to make you dinner.”

 

\---

 

After Jace wanders off to bed, Magnus stays up for a while to wait for Alec to come home, but gives up around midnight. He tries to go to sleep, but no matter how much he tosses and turns, he keeps thinking of Alec, possibly sleeping on the same side, separated by a thin wall. 

He gives up a few hours later and turns the overhead light on. The boxes he used to move in are broken down and tucked in the back of his closet.

He pulls one out and tapes the bottom together, then puts all his Urban Outfitters candles in them, the chotskies he picked up in Fiji, Helena, Marrakech. He pulls the tapestries off the walls, takes down the posters he picked up in a muddled daze at a Phish Concert in Florida. 

Once he’s done, his room looks bereft, stripped down to its bare bones. He puts up a picture of his mom, groups a few candles together on the nightstand, and puts his stack of Babby Flay cookbooks on the dresser, the one alec gave him on top, always within easy reach. Taking a step back to survey the results, Magnus has to admit it looks less hoarder-chic and more like the room of the room of a semi-stylish adult. 

Room put to rights, there’s really one thing he has left to do.

Magnus trudges to Alec’s door, knocks on it, and isn’t surprised when no one answers.

He slides down the wall, thinking.

Suddenly, he knows where Alec will be.

 

\---

 

Magnus climbs the stairs, one foot in front of the other. 

He finds Alec on the roof, sprawled out in one of the lawn chairs, an ugly blanket tossed over his shoulders.

"What are you doing out here?" Magnus asks.

"Working on my line dancing," Alec says, deadpan. 

"Looks like you're just sitting around."

"That must be why I never win any dance competitions," Alec says and runs his hands through his hair. He looks like a stressed-out hedgehog. "What do you want, Magnus?” 

“I thought it was time we talked.”

"I thought we were fine?” Alec looks away and picks at the blanket. It strikes Magnus that Alec is a hideously bad liar and has always been. It’s a wonder that Alec can defend criminals without blushing and stammering his way through cases. He cries at reality TV, says he loves eating healthy but worships at the altar of lousy TV chefs, says he just wants to be casual with Magnus, then hides on the roof.

Magnus is such a dope. How could he have not seen it before?

"Such a fucking bad liar," Magnus says affectionately.

He looks out over the city. Magnus remembers traveling the world, alone and afraid, unsure of where he belonged, desperate to cover up the fact that he was a hick from a town that barely warranted a dot on a map. He wonders when he got so damn shiny, so reflective that no one could see who he really was. When he told Alec he had no idea how to have a genuine connection with another person, he was talking about himself. 

“So, what do you need to say to me? Going to tell me again that everything that’s awful in my life is all my fault?”

Magnus winces. “None of that was true. It was a shitty, mean thing to say.”

“Yeah, it was,” Alec agrees. “But I guess I didn’t have to be mean right back.”

“You weren’t wrong.”

Alec sits up, letting the blanket fall from his shoulders. “Yes, I was. You’re not nothing. You’re definitely something important," Alec says, fumbling over the words. "You know, to me.”

“You’re something to me, too,” Magnus confesses.

Magnus has prided himself on never apologizing, on never being sorry for who he is--but Alec, he deserves an apology and an explanation. Magnus wants him to have it. “The day we had our fight, my patient died on me. It was my first one and--” his voice breaks and he stops.

“Oh, Magnus, I’m so sorry.”

“He was just there one moment and gone the next. I maybe didn’t handle it well.”

“So you decided to come home and pick a fight with me?”

“Pretty much,” Magnus says. “And I’m sorry for that.”

Alec mouth twitches. “How did that apology taste?”

“Like bitter ashes and despair, and I hated it,” Magnus admits. “Got any room on the chair?”

Alec pushes the blanket aside and makes room for him and they squeeze in together, side by side. It’s horribly uncomfortable; the chair isn’t fit to hold one grown man, let alone two, but he can’t think of anywhere else he’d rather be. 

Alec pulls the blanket over them both and Magnus lays his head against Alec’s chest, realizing something he’d half-known since the first moment he laid eyes on the surly giant. 

Alec isn't Fiji, he’s not Barcelona, he’s not the one miserable week Magnus spent on the swamp in Florida hunting gators. He’s not one more stop on a storied life full of misadventures; Alec is the final destination. 

He feels like home.

 

\---

 

Later in bed, he undresses Alec carefully. “My mom worked two jobs growing up after my dad skipped town. I don’t know how to do this, how to need people. I’m probably going to fuck this all up. I’ve always been alone.”

“You’re not now,” Alec says and leans up to kiss him, breaking away only to pull off his shirt and toss it to the ground. “I’m here for you.”

“Everyone needs you, I can’t be one more person to depend on you.” He kisses his way down Alec’s neck. “Let me take care of you for once.”

He settles between Alec’s open knees, wishing the lights were on and he could see Alec's face better, but for now, he needs the shadows. 

“Then what do you suggest, nurse?”

“Oh, see, now this is why there’s no respect for my profession,” Magnus complains, laughing. “I will not be dressing up in a slutty nurse costume.”

“Even if I promise to still respect you in the morning?”

“Let’s make a deal, then,” Magnus says, grabbing lube and a condom from beneath his pillow, ignoring Alec‘s pointed eyeroll. “You dress up in a costume of my choosing and I’ll do the same.”

“Deal,” Alec says and hisses as Magnus makes a fist around his dick, letting Alec fuck up into the heat of his hand. 

Magnus mouths mindlessly at his neck and shoulder, reaches down to prod at Alec’s ass, teasing him with a dry finger. 

“Stop fucking around and do it already,” Alec complains. 

Magnus laughs and grabs the lube, gets it all over the sheets and doesn’t give a flying fuck. Life’s messy, and so is he. He reaches back down and pushes his finger into Alec’s body slowly, and leans in close just to watch the way Alec sucks his bottom lip into his mouth and chews it, eyes fluttering shut. 

“Want me to turn over?” Alec asks breathlessly.

“However you want to do it this time,” Magnus says.

“I’d like to--” Alec stops. “I like it this way.”

“So do I,” Magnus says and kisses him again, deeper, somehow softer this time. Whoever had Alec before - he doesn’t yet know the stories, but there’s time for that later - whoever had him like this and let him go is a moron, an absolute fool. Magnus doesn't intend to make the same mistake twice.

Magnus stretches out Alec slowly, taking his time, leaning in to kiss Alec's lips, damp and trembling beneath his until Alec's a squirming, cursing mess beneath him.

He puts the condom on and pushes himself into Alec's body, one hand tucked up beneath Alec's spine, pushing his hips closer as he fucks in and out of Alec with short, jerky movements, overwhelmed all over again.

He speeds up, drives his dick in deeper. He hears the headboard bang against the wall as Alec meets him, legs wrapped around his waist, his own cock rubbing Magnus' stomach with each thrust, gasping into his sweaty neck, against tendons pulled tight.

They’re going to wake the neighbors up, the cops will come and cart them off to jail naked, but Magnus doesn’t care. He loves Alec, he has him, and neither of them are going anywhere.

Alec’s fingers cling to Magnus’ shoulders a bit too tight, no doubt leaving red crescents that’ll last beyond the night, slipping over the sweaty skin, scratching down his arm as he gasps and comes all over himself.

Magnus keeps going, pushing into Alec’s tight body over and over, listening to Alec whimper and clutch feebly at his back as he fucks him into the mattress. Magnus comes hot and deep inside Alec, the feeling from last time making a reappearance, right at the edge of his consciousness. He chases it and lets it in, this feeling that’s just a bit too big. He forces himself to face it head-on, all the tenderness and affection and love and need.

He can live with that. 

Magnus pulls out and collapses on top of Alec, presses a light kiss to his chest, hearing Alec let his legs drop heavily with a groan while combing his hands through Magnus’ hair absently.

“Love you so much,” Magnus mumbles into Alec’s chest and feels Alec’s fingers stutter to a stop, then resume. 

His eyes drift shut, he doesn’t even care that they’re going to be fused together with crusty spunk in the morning. Nothing matters, except this moment, narrowed to the two of them, Alec’s strong body around his, his hand, his heartbeat beneath Magnus’ cheek. His eyes begin drifting shut, but just before he goes to sleep completely, he hears Alec murmur, “You would wait until now to say it. Love you, too, you asshole. Please don't go.”

Here’s the thing -- you don’t have to have life figured out at twenty, thirty, or even forty. You take what you're given, try to find some measure of peace, and do the best you can.

Life is ever-changing, ever-evolving, and so much of it boils down to a simple choice: _stay or go._

There is no right or wrong, except refusing to make a choice at all. This time, Magnus reaches up, threads Alec's fingers through his, and stays.

 

 

 

 


	7. add finishing touches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why don’t you dial 1-800-I don’t give a fuck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter titles are the steps for renovating your home. thanks for reading.

 

 

“I think you’ve been robbed,” Alec says, looking around at Magnus’ bare walls.

Magnus cracks an eye open, a little furious that it’s already morning. Alec’s sitting up in bed, looking adorably confused.

“Didn’t get robbed, cleaned my room,” Magnus tells him gruffly. “Got rid of a few things. Seemed like time.” He didn’t want to hang onto his past while his future slipped away from him. They were just things. Awesome things, but still.

”Where’d that blanket on your bed go? The one with the green and blue? I liked that one.”

“It’s in a box somewhere,” Magnus says. He remembers Alec spread out on it, nervous and excited, and finds that he’s fond of that one, too. Not all mementos of the past are bad.

He gets out of bed and rifles through one of the boxes until he finds it with a soft, triumphant sound. Alec leans over the side of the bed and grabs his boxers, swinging his legs around to slip them on and when Magnus comes back, he looks surprised.

“Where are you going?” Magnus asks, holding the blanket.

“I just--”

Magnus gets back into the bed, wraps his arms around Alec from behind and hauls him back towards him. Well, he tries to. Alec is kind of heavy. Mostly he manages to pull Alec on top of him with a pained huff, but Alec is laughing, a warm crushing weight on his chest. Alec turns over, eyes a few inches from his, hair standing straight out on one side and flat on the other, stubble growing in patchy and uneven, eyes crusty around the edges. He has a fondness for ugly blankets, awful food, and even worse music with ironic banjos. He’s gross, totally and irredeemably human, and Magnus has never thought he looked better.

It’s really easy to be infatuated with someone; it’s significantly harder to like someone when faced with the harsh reality of them.

“I like you,” Magnus says.

“You’re a bit strange,” Alec says, looking down at Magnus oddly.

“Yeah," Magnus agrees and kisses Alec, holding onto him and sinking into the moment, for however long it lasts.

  
\---

 

A few days later, he manages to complete his last clinical. Magnus grabs his duffle bag, heading out of the hospital, every muscle in his body sore. As it turns out, taking care of sick people is long, sucky work, but he feels great.

His Instructor watched him carefully throughout the day and nodded approvingly at him as he finished up and did his last rounds. "You've got this," she said. He may or may not. Magnus still kind of feels like a failure of a human, it still physically hurts him to be in the hospital and he can't make himself go to certain rooms, but he's here and trying. It's all he can do.

Magnus sighs, rubbing the back of his neck, trying to work out the knot of tension sitting at the top of his spine. He's so distracted, he almost doesn’t notice Alec hunched sitting on the bench outside the hospital.

He does a doubletake, then heads over to the bench. “Hey, handsome.”

Alec looks stunned, just shy of a full-blown panic attack. “I think I quit my job.”

“Is that a good or bad thing?”

“I don’t know. I was just--fed up. And I couldn’t do it anymore. So, I spoke without thinking. I don't ever do that. I think you're rubbing off on me.”

Well, he certainly did earlier this morning, but Magnus manfully keeps himself from saying it. Alec is often panicky and high strung, but he's usually the one with a plan. An Alec without a plan spells doom for them all. He‘s the only one that does performative adulthood with any kind of consistency. Magnus sits down on the bench, thinking he should probably just buy it from the hospital. It does seem to be the focus for all of his big moments in life. “Do you think you could ask for your job back?”

“Probably not," Alec sighs. “Things got weird towards the end. I think I made things weird.“

“How weird, on a scale of one to being caught in a furry costume by your boss?"

“Got kind of personal with my insults but not full-blown crazy, so like, only the fuzzy ears, maybe.”

Magnus looks around; it's getting dark out. “Have you been waiting out here for long?”

“A few hours.”

“Not that I’m not thrilled to see you, but why didn’t just go home? This is really out of your way. I would have been home soon enough.”

Alec looks at him strangely, a little wonderingly, like now that it's been pointed out, he's slightly baffled by his own behavior. He should join the club. Magnus never knows why he does anything. “I don’t know," Aley says. "I was just upset and wanted to see you.”

“Okay,” Magnus says and takes Alec’s hand, leading him home.

 

\---

 

A week of watching Alec mope around, Magnus leaving for class and coming home to find him in the same place, and he's concerned. At least Alec's dressed today, mostly. Magnus leaves his bookbag on the floor by the front door.  
  
Jace is sitting at the table watching movies on his laptop, nodding along to his headphones.

As he explained last week, he’s on the path to becoming the smartest person in the world and he thinks he can do it by watching the movie version of every classic book.

“You know, you could try to go back to college,” Alec says reasonably, standing behind him.

“Pirating videos is easier.”

“Yes, but also illegal,” Alec says. “And far less useful for finding permanent employment.”

“I like working at the bar,” Jace says. “Leaves my days free for education.” His shoulders are hunched defensively like this is an argument they’ve had too many times. Magnus crosses the room, touches Alec’s arm, and shakes his head gently.

“As long as you’re happy,” Alec says doubtfully, peering worriedly at the film over Jace‘s shoulder. “Oh, now this isn‘t how Pearl Harbor happened at all.” He snatches the pen out of Jace’s hand. “Stop taking notes, man.”

“College isn’t for everyone,” Magnus interjects and hands Jace back his pen. “But it’s always there if you want to go back later.”

Jace shoots Magnus a grateful look and says, “Thanks.” Sometimes, just giving people permission and space to fuck up is enough for them to figure out what they want to do.

Magnus doesn’t think Jace will go college, he thinks maybe he’ll forge his own path forward with the same stubbornness and resilience he’s shown his whole life. And maybe he’ll suffer a few venereal diseases and other setbacks, but hey, no one’s perfect. He’ll be fine.

Alec, he’s not so sure about. He's starting to wear permanent ass-grooves in the couch where he’s spending his days. Today, he's wearing boxers and an ugly patterned bird shirt Jace got for him because he thinks a rudderless and confused Alec is kind of hilarious. As it turns out, when your entire identity is tied up into a job you no longer have, you spiral a bit. Alec is spiraling and worst of all, he’s doing it in fugly clothes.

Some problems are easy to fix, some take more work, and some can't be fixed at all. Magnus is beginning to suspect short of opening his own morally dubious law firm, hiring Alec, and winning a bunch of cases he's entirely unqualified for and knows nothing about, he can't do anything at all except be here for Alec.

  
\---

 

The next morning, he’s surprised to see Alec up and wearing pants. “Oh, is it a special occasion?” Magnus asks.

Alec's standing in front of the bathroom mirror, fiddling with his tie. “I, uh, got a call from an old friend of mine from college. He may have a job for me. I'm overqualified, it’s shitty pay, and nothing glamorous, but it’s public defense. It's good work.”

“Does it speak to you?”

“I--guess? I think I’d sleep better at night.” He sighs, giving up on hie tie completely. It's tied entirely too short and the knot is awkward and lumpy about four inches from his neck. Magnus motions Alec closer, undoes his knot and starts over again entirely. He aims for a Half Windsor and manages something respectable.  
Magnus knows it’s rhetorical, but can’t help bitterly reflecting that Alec never seems to have difficulty sleeping when he’s snoring loudly enough to wake the dead. Whenever you live with someone for months before becoming official, you sort of skip over the honeymoon phase and slip right into married old couple, deeply in love but annoyed by your partner’s sheer audacity to enjoy breathing.

“There’s no dress code, really. But I figure I should probably wear pants--”

“Shame,” Magnus interjects.

“--but I think most places are like that,” Alec continues, purposefully ignoring Magnus.

“Why?”

“Common decency?” Alec says with a shrug. He looks down at his tie. "Thanks."

Honestly, Magnus will be a little sorry to see the shirts in wild prints go. It’s not like Alec’s actually a bad dresser, just bland like mashed potatoes on white bread. But Alec is so many things, he doesn’t have to dress well. After all, he caught Magnus’ attention without even trying.

Probably because he’s so tall and annoyed by life. Magnus has a terrible weakness for self-righteousness and diffidence.

“The job sounds perfect for you,” Magnus says.

“It’s a lot less money.”

“Oh, well. There go my dreams of being a kept man.” He pulls Alec closer, can almost taste the anxiety in the air. “We’ll be fine.” He knows no such thing, of course, but he supposes it’s another one of those annoying things you have to take on faith, so he says it anyway.

 

\---

 

After months of living on takeout and watching Izzy and Jace survive on nitrates alone, Magnus decides it’s downright pathetic that two adults consider microwaving popcorn cooking. He corrals Izzy and Jace into the kitchen. “We’re going to make French Onion Soup. It’s tasty, requires little in the way actual skill, and looks far more impressive than it actually is.”

“Kind of like Izzy,” Jace says and Izzy punches him on the arm, hard, judging by Jace’s wince.

“I don’t see why I have to learn how to cook,” Izzy complains. “I’m nearly a doctor. I’m gonna be so rich, I can pay people to cook for me.”

“Way to do it for the people, Iz,” Alec yells from his bedroom.

“Also, to help people,” Izzy adds a little guiltily.

“Uh huh,” Magnus says. “Well, when you're fabulously wealthy, you can hire me, moneybags. Until then, learn how to chop an onion.” He pulls one out with a cutting board. “Alec, time to put away your work, come here and be my lovely assistant.”

“I live to serve,” Alec says dryly, emerging from his room. He still uses his room as an office, works for a couple hours after coming home, then puts it all away. Magnus is mostly just relieved he doesn’t have to listen to sad hipster music through the thin walls anymore.

“Well, you gotta live for something.” He turns toward Izzy and places her hands on the end of the onion, her fingers tucked in so she doesn’t lose the tips to the sharp knife. She’s going to need those. “Chop off the ends, then cut it in half. After that, turn it over on the flat side and slice it into even pieces.”

“You don’t need a ruler or anything,” Alec says knowledgeably.

“Thank you, Alexander,” Magnus says.

“You’re not chopping that right,” Izzy leans over to tell Jace, not paying attention to her own onion. “I don’t think he’s chopping that right, Magnus.”

“Sure, okay,” Jace says agreeably to Izzy. “Why don’t you dial 1-800-I don’t give a fuck?”

“Izzy, don’t tattle. Jace, what the fuck are you doing?”

“I started cubing the cheese and the pieces sort of looked lonely. I made them into a little family,” Jace explains, grouping his oddly shaped cheese cubes into a lumpy pile.

“Oh, they don’t get lonely, they’re just cheese,” Alec explains very seriously.

Magnus looks at Alec, flabbergasted. What kind of nutty family has he found himself part of?

“Do you think we could work vegetable trivia into Candy Land night?” Izzy asks, nearly done with her onion. It‘s only taken her thirty minutes. They should be ready to eat by midnight.

“I don’t see why not,” Magnus says. It’s not the craziest thing he’s been asked in the last day; it’s not even the craziest thing that he’s been asked in the last five minutes.

He thinks of what he might have done if he hadn’t seen the newspaper listing, if he hadn’t decided that a really cheap apartment with three strangers wasn't totally skeevy and suspect.

He wouldn’t have this: a totally awesome boyfriend that’s re-shaping his life in new and terrifying ways; a sister who says doctors don’t mix with nurses, but eats lunch with him every day and waits for him outside the locker room when their shifts end at the same time; a brother who regularly offers to fight people for him, even though Magnus insisted the person who was rude to him was just a confused old man.

“Doesn’t matter,” Jace insisted doggedly. “He knows that he did.“ It was really weird for Magnus to worry every phone call was going to be the police telling him to come bail Jace out. He should call his mom and apologize again.

“What?” Jace had asked Magnus’ appalled face. “Is it illegal? Are the old people police going to come get me?”

“Yes,” Alec said flatly. “It is very much illegal, Jace. As I’ve explained a thousand times, it's _assault_.”

Magnus sees Izzy concentrating on cutting the last part of the onion with much more attention to detail than it really requires, Jace busy making cheese families, and Alec chewing on his bottom lip, clearly fighting the urge not to correct them all.

“What are you thinking about?” Alec leans over and asks Magnus, voice low.

“Where I’d be if I hadn’t met any of you all,” Magnus answers honestly.

“Probably somewhere really glamorous,” Izzy says wistfully, finally done with her onion. Only five more to go.

“Probably with twins,” Jace adds with a leer.

All of the above is true, and yet--he can’t imagine his life any other way than what it is--warm, satisfying, fulfilling. He tells them this, feels Alec’s eyes on his face, searching.

“Are you crying, Iz?” Jace asks loudly.

“Shut up,” she hisses at Jace. “It’s just the onions.”

Izzy wipes her eyes discretely on the sleeve of her shirt. “Can we listen to music or something? Please, god, pretend like none of this happened?”

“I know Magnus would take any excuse to dance, but I probably shouldn’t," Alec says nervously. "You remember what happened last time.”

“Yeah, but there are no cops here now,” Izzy says and leans over, turns on the radio and settles on something soft and upbeat. Magnus is dying to know the story, but there’s time enough for that later.

Magnus grabs Alec by the waist and tries to spin him around. Describing Alec as having two left feet would be a kindness. He might as well be lurching around on toothpicks attached to cinderblocks, but Magnus doesn't care. He carefully guides Alec through the steps.

“Hey, cooking isn't so bad. It’s kind of like a party,” Izzy says. She’s kicked off her shoes, hair pulled into a messy bun on top of her head, relaxed and happy.

Jace looks at her pityingly. “You’re holding garlic and dancing by yourself. You’ve been studying and working so much, you’ve forgotten what a real party’s like.”

“Oh, shut up and dance with me,” Izzy says and Jace takes her hand.

“Would you like me to dip you?” Magnus asks Alec, holding him close.

“That sounds dirty,” Alec says, looking down at their feet, counting under his breath. “Is that something dirty? Should we be in private for this?”

Magnus throws back his head and laughs, keeps going in their shitty apartment as the food cooks and bubbles around them, surrounded by his newfound family.

So, Magnus has learned a few things: the truth is that there’s no moment when you’re magically an adult. There is just the gradual grind towards a place of serenity and acceptance. Until then, take life for what it is, embrace it, and be present in the moment. Don’t borrow trouble. Help others and let them help you in return.

And in the meantime, keep dancing.

 

 

 

 


End file.
